Ecommerce

Black Friday – the fourth Friday in November – comes the day after the US holiday of Thanksgiving and traditionally marks a surge in high street Christmas shopping, with the corresponding event of Cyber Monday marking a red-letter date for online marketing after the same weekend. Despite being an American holiday, in recent years more… more »

Your product or service might be fantastic, but if your advert or landing page doesn’t prompt the user to buy it, your conversion rate could be very low. This blog identifies five important elements to bear in mind. 1. Images Recent stats show 78% of shoppers want to see images, 67% say the image they… more »

It’s normal for buying decisions to take longer when consumers shop for high-value products – and for customers to spend that time comparing different product features and deciding on the best value for money. When it comes to web marketing, you could be forgiven for thinking that means it’s less important to be the first… more »

A five-star rating might not be all it’s cracked up to be in the world of online reviews – in fact, a four-star rating could be better for product sales in the long run. If that sounds strange, think about what you are looking for when you read online reviews of a product with a… more »

The rise of the selfie appears unstoppable. The online retailer Amazon first patented one-click purchasing; now they have gone one step further by submitting a patent application for payments by selfies. The patent application shows that while many approaches rely on a password to be entered for user authentication, these passwords can be taken or… more »

You are building a relationship with people who may continue to use your product for the next 25 years. Those interactions that you have, particularly through social streams that you can get through digital, are super valuable. It would be a shame not to invest in that. Chris Moody, Creative Director at Wolff Olins, speaking… more »

There’s only ten days to go until Christmas and many of us will yet to have finished (or even started!) our Christmas shopping. So it’s now that we pound the streets or jump online looking for those elusive gifts. For those keen to avoid the hustle and bustle of the shops at this time of… more »

It’s that time of the year again, Black Friday is back, and shoppers are getting ready for the discounts that will hit both the stores and online sales this Friday! This US tradition has recently been adopted here in the UK and gets bigger each year with more offers than ever before! The public are… more »

Online marketing is undergoing an unprecedented boom time, with many categories of ecommerce seeing buying intentions double and even triple. According to a Nielsen report, more than half of the 22 product categories it tracks have seen shoppers’ buying intentions double since 2011, with several tripling in that time. The list of high-growth segments is… more »

Hello there. I’m the newest member of the First Internet team, so be kind! I hail from North Wales with a background in digital marketing and promotions, largely working in the music and arts industries. Music is a huge passion of mine as a performer and as a gig-goer, Manchester’s rich culture and history steeped… more »

Online growth and the ability to capture and manipulate data like never before has led us to coin the phrase Big Data. Big Data is the latest buzz word in the internet world and something that already impacts on just about every UK citizen. It is something anyone who uses or trades on the internet… more »

Online sales grew in March 2014, according to the latest official Retail Sales figures from the Office for National Statistics. This year, the weather in March was relatively settled, with plenty of warm, clear days – and that might be expected to drive footfall to physical stores and away from online. Indeed, the figures for… more »

New technologies are emerging constantly, in 2009 Bitcoin became one of them. Though controversial it has recently become much more popular, with an increase in both media coverage and uptake. What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, so named because it uses cryptography when creating and transferring money. It exists as a decentralised network, with… more »

With the announcement that in the New Year retailer Morrison’s intends to offer home delivery from their new online store for just a pound (compared to Tesco and Sainsbury’s, minimum £3 and £2.99 respectively), it got me thinking just how important reduced postage and packing costs are to successful online sales. The retail world has… more »

Few people would be surprised to hear that online festive spend – in particular, purchases made using debit and credit cards via the internet during December – has increased year by year in recent times. But figures from the Payments Council show the massive growth that has been recorded by online retailers, even in spite… more »

Considering that most technologically minded households now contain a laptop and a smartphone, along with potentially a tablet as well, you might imagine that most m-commerce would take place outside of the home. For instance, if you have a desktop PC or a laptop that rarely leaves the house, you would arguably use that for… more »

The advent of tablets has had a significant role in increasing online spend, with many consumers now preferring to shop online rather than in person, according to a report from Verdict Retail. In newly published figures, the analyst notes the difference between the proportion who prefer to shop in ‘real-world’ stores, compared with the proportion… more »

You may notice that some websites force the use of www in front of their domain names, such as Facebook, and some do not, such as Twitter. While this probably goes unnoticed for most users I always wondered if there were any benefits or pitfalls of either way. The term WWW is an abbreviation of… more »

“Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer,” they say – and while online marketing and web design have been enemies of the high street for several years, 2013 is likely to be the year that all changes. Until recently, bricks-and-mortar stores have been seen as totally separate from online retail sites. But the Europe… more »